MOSQUITOES hausted, duped, self-deceived. It was his own greed, after all, that drew him here. The check from the Ecumenical Insti- tute. It's agonIzing sitting here like this, forced into this kind of voyeurism. Brother Marcus just looks out at all of them, his beard startlingly white, his eyes the intense blue of the very young and the very old. "I believe I am the senior member of the group," he says again. "I am eighty-four years old. My name is Brother Marcus Goldwater, and I think I've been invited because of my life expe- rience, ecumenically speaking. I was raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in a family of Reformed Jewish background. We went every year to the Temple on the High Holy Days, and there was a dinner every year on Passover. Also, we children belonged to a Jewish social club, where we went to dances and singing parties. At the age of eighteen I got a job at the Sears and Roebuck Company and I stayed with the company nine years, where I fell under the influence of my immediate supervisor, who set out to court me into Catholicism " 'What do you mean, 'court you'?" Ed asks, shocked. He has never heard anything like this in his life. He's stunned to come up against such a figure-the voice, those eyes, that bright-white beard. "By courting I mean that he never pretended he was doing anything different," Goldwater explains, more de- liberately than ever, "and yet he never forced me farther than I wanted to go. He courted me the way a man courts a young girl. He never made any pretenses, though. He told me that he had con- verted five and he hoped I would be his sixth. It happened gradually. He used my natural curiosity, like this-'I'm going to a beautiful concert,' he said to me. 'I want to take you along, but you wouldn't understand it.' Well, that piqued me, of course. I insisted he take me. The con- cert was a holy Mass. I sank down on my knees, and I could understand." "You are saying," Mauricio says dryly, "that this man seduced you into Catholicism." "Oh, yes," says Goldwater, "he se- duced me very deliberately. Yes, indeed. But I think that's what a conversion is. I surrendered myself up, body and soul. I fell in love with the Church. Yielded away. My supervisor at the Sears and Roebuck Company was not interested in 73 an easy infatuation or a quick conversion. ories-she was standing in the golden He insisted I take instruction, which I light of the window in late afternoon did for several years, and later, when I with a book before her. 'Mama, Mama,' decided I wanted to take orders, he ques- I asked her, as small children do, 'why are tioned me severely." Brother Marcus you standing there with that book?' looks down at his hands, and Ed notices "'Because I am praying,' she an- his ring for the first time; it's large and swered me. 'Praying to the creator who silver, a Gothic cross that reaches almost made the world.' Small as I was, this im- to the first knuckle-it's a little tar- pressed me deeply, and from that mo- nished, so it looks at first like wrought ment I also wanted to dedicate myself to iron. "So I was his sixth," Marcus says. God, the creator of this beautiful world." "But this I remember him telling me, Ed squirms. He closes his eyes and and I have always been grateful for it. He sees pictures. Embarrassing pictures. said, 'Never forget your roots. Never for- The kind that hang in the social hall of get you were born a Jew.' And I have not. his temple in D.C. Fake Chagalls of the Some of you here will surely think I am old country. A woman standing at the an apostate, but I am not. I'm just the window, a babushka on her head. A pair opposite, because I have preserved my of klutzy candlesticks. Does Lehrer ex- identity. And I have never given up my pect them to believe he grew up in one of Jewish name, Marcus Goldwater." those pictures? It makes Ed sick, because "Oh dear, oh my!" gasps old Rabbi he does believe it. He sees Lehrer in all Lehrer. He is convulsed with laughter, those garish colors, that village with roofs and no one can believe it. He sounds ab- tilted upward and rabbis with upturned solutely pixillated. "I had this one from a eyes and frail, Hasidic faces and Lehrer's congregant of mine in North Carolina," mother floating at the window. He sees he wheezes, eyes streaming. "There was a it all, and it is maddening, the way man--a Jewish man--and somehow his Lehrer triggers these clichés. Affuming name got onto the solicitation list for the that he, Ed, has roots in bad lithographs Republican Party. The girl calls him up and the pictures on mortuary calendars; and says, 'Mr. Goldwasser, may I put you that he, Ed, originally comes from a down for a contribution?' Says the man, Judaica shop, and that his cultural 'My name is Goldwater. Goldwater, not memory is bound in coffee-table books. Goldwasser. My father's name is Gold- "My parents," Lehrer continues, as water, my grandfather, olev hasholem, his Brother Marcus nods off again, "had name was Goldwater, too!' dearly hoped I would become a rabbi "But on one subject I must seriously when they saw my love of learning in the disagree with you, Brother Mark," the little school my brothers and I attended. rabbi says, wiping the tears from his eyes. In any case, it seemed ordained that I "You are not the senior member of the should be a rabbi. Our last name was party, because I am eighty-five. And, Lehrer, which means teacher, and my God willing, in November I'll be eighty- parents had given me the name Mena- six! I was born in a little town that would chem, which means comforter. In fact, I now be in Romania if it had sur- was named after my sainted vived the First War and if what _ grandfather on the maternal side, was left had been spared, by the who was directly descended from Nazis later on. This is history! the famous Vilna Gaon, one of One 'if after another. But I had a beauti- the greatest teachers and scholars who ful, religious childhood, thanks to my ever lived. Well, I grew into something parents, of blessed memory. My father of a lalmid chachem myself. What can I had a sawmill and kept us prosperous say? It was not my intelligence but my and well Always he instilled in us a love Jove of the subject that spurred me on. I of education, and he kept a library in the loved God's word-this was my gift." house, where he himself would read and Ed shifts in his chair. His right foot meditate. He was prominent in the syna- has fallen asleep. He writes a note to gogue and in the town. His greatest joy Mauricio: "I don't think I can take this was to give to the poor and provide for much longer." them. But it was my dear mother who "How fortunate that we emigrated to instilled in me my spiritual sense from Toronto when we did, in 1915!" Rabbi the time I was a child, and I remember Lehrer exclaims. "I was only a small boy, that once-it is one of my earliest mem- but truly my life has been full of bless-